Praise for West of Sunset
“O’Nan’s adroitness with atmosphere and period detail makes Fitzgerald’s dreams of creating worthy work, even with his best days behind him, absorbing and poignant.” – The New Yorker
“[The] grim yet undeniably fascinating last act of Fitzgerald’s life is the subject of Stewart O’Nan’s gorgeous new novel. . .West of Sunset is a pretty fine Hollywood novel, too, but it’s an even finer novel about a great writer’s determination to keep trying to do his best work.”—Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
“A mesmerizing and haunting novel. . .O’Nan delivers – whole-body – the sensation that you are deep inside a living, breathing, suffering consciousness. . .Another triumph of the novel surfaces in O’Nan’s wily insinuation into Fitzgerald’s creative life, how it breathes through his everyday existence. Movingly and believingly, the manner in which a writer works – thinks, processes, assimilates, envies – is given life. And that is ultimately what makes the book so special.”—The Boston Globe
“[An] almost unbearably bittersweet portrait of the once-great novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sad yet glittering final years in Hollywood. . .the repartee gleams with malicious wit.”—USA Today
“Engrossing. . .O’Nan skillfully pulls us into Fitzgerald’s gilded and yet familiar world. He brings the Hollywood legends to life. By the end, they feel like friends. . .A story well-told about interesting people in interesting times.”—The Chicago Tribune
“There’s a certain romance to the tortured genius mythology, but Stewart O’Nan makes quick work of dispelling it in this beautifully written historical novel which follows Fitzgerald’s stint as a screenwriter during the 1930s, captures that era of Hollywood well, offering juicy scenes with Humphrey Bogart, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, and other Fitzgerald friends and hangers-on, while lending witty dialogue to his affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, a doomed romance that’s worthy of a classic film.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Just as O’Nan succeeded in drawing readers inside the heads of such ordinary people as the elderly widow Emily in Emily, Alone, or Manny DeLeon, the hapless chain-restaurant manager in Last Night at the Lobster, he inhabits Fitzgerald’s very being and authentically depicts the writer’s fluctuating mind-sets during the final years of his life…an intimate portrayal of a flawed man who never gave up.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“O’Nan, an accomplished, award-winning writer who has clearly done his biographical homework, polishes this saga to a seductive sheen, populates it with persuasive incarnations of Dorothy Parker, Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway, and others, and takes us to a very dark place indeed.”—Elle
“West of Sunset is a rich, sometimes heartbreaking journey through the disintegration of an American legend. O’Nan captures the fire and frailty of F. Scott Fitzgerald with an understated grace that would have made Fitzgerald himself stand up and applaud.”—Dennis Lehane
“An achingly nuanced love story and one of the best biographical novels to come along in years. O’Nan’s great achievement here is in so convincingly inhabiting the character of Scott Fitzgerald and of the people surrounding him during his descent into the clarifying depths of 1930s Hollywood.”—T.C. Boyle
“Our contemporary master Stewart O’Nan – the king of the quotidian – has changed his brush stroke and given us a picture of another American master, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the last years of his life. This is an amazing book, book one great writer about another, just an amazement.”—Elizabeth Strout
“O’Nan is an incredibly versatile and charming writer. This novel, which imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s troubled time in Hollywood (with cameos by Dorothy Parker, Bogie, and Hemingway), takes up (like much of O’Nan’s work) that essential conundrum of grace struggling with paucity. One brilliant American writer meditating on another–what’s not to love?”—George Saunders
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